A while ago a friend gave me a book. It was such an inspiring and beautifully illustrated book that I bought a copy for my running buddy, Penny. She loved it too: and suggested that our next challenge should be to do the entire book.
The book was Barry Holmes’ Over the Hill at 60 Something, and I recommend it highly for anyone who loves running in the Lake District, is thinking about doing all the Wainwrights, and who would like some inspiration for some new routes. I’m sure many of them will take us along tracks and paths we’ve run before, but adding on other byways that we don’t know.
We decided to start with Catstye Cam, no. 20 in Mr Holmes’ book and only about 11-12km. We’ve run up the track towards the mines and the Youth Hostel before – during the Hevellyn or Glenridding trail race – but as we headed up Greenside lane we were commenting about how you tend to remember bits of races and run routes rather than the whole thing. My main memory of going up towards the Youth Hostel in the Lakeland Trail race was that I was walking bits and running bits, and sometimes overtaking people who might then overtake me back…
Apparently Greenside mine was a lead and silver mine, and once the biggest in the UK. Nowadays a hydro-electric scheme is fed from the beck that plunges down the side, and the terraces formed by the mine still step up the hill behind the cottages opposite the youth hostel (the cottages are currently on the market – £400k-odd for a 2-bed and £600k for the 3-bed. Pity they’re outside my budget, though they’re not exactly accessible for everyday living unless you have a fairly sturdy car).
By the Youth Hostel we took the path towards Red Tarn. This led on uphill, at first gently and then more steeply, while we alternately got rained on and then optimistically hoped that the sun was going to come out and the clouds and mist would blow away. We were to be disappointed. As we both commented on how un-mountain-fit we feel at the moment, I began to think maybe it didn’t really matter if we didn’t actually get to the top of Catstye Cam. Penny disagreed and tried bribing me with the promise of a bowl of soup when we got back down: I didn’t in fact take much persuading as it did seem silly to go all that way and not get to the top.
The path was quite rocky, and with the amount of water there’s been – and continues to be – the rocks were quite slippery. As we turned to go up to the summit the wind also started gusting, and at the top I was holding on to my hat. This was partly as in fact the rain seemed to have made it stretch and get looser – it seemed to be falling further and further down over my eyes as the day went on. Even in the rain and mist there’s a sense of achievement in getting to the top of something; we did think that the view would be stunning on a clear day!
Running back down was, of course, mostly easier – apart from where the rocks were quite large and slippery. We nipped back down to Red Tarn, which looked as if it would be very inviting for a swim on a warmer day. I thought about my Bristol Rovers hat which blew into the Tarn back in about 2002 when David and I and some of his friends and family were walking up Striding Edge (I was mostly on all 4s, it was so windy that day).
From Red Tarn it should have been a fairly straightforward run back to Glenridding, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d drawn Mr Holmes’ route wrongly on a photocopy of part of the OS map, which was getting damper and more bedraggled in my pocket. Instead of staying to the north west of the wall leading up to Birkhouse Moor, we went over the stile at the Hole in the Wall: where we also got a slightly clearer and sunnier view across to Ullswater in the distance, with low lying dramatic clouds lifting slowly above. As we then couldn’t see an obvious path, we ended up inventing a route downhill through the bracken to join up with a lower path, then crossed through more bracken to come out near Lanty’s Tarn. From there the path back to Glenridding is easy to follow, with stony steps, and we’ve done it several times before in either direction.
Mr Holmes ran the route in 1 hour and 50 minutes. It had taken us nearly 4 hours by the time we got back to the car and as it was a Sunday there was no time for soup. Still, we won’t get fitter if we don’t start somewhere. Which route shall we try next?
runningin3time 